Showing posts with label Putin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Putin. Show all posts

Friday, March 4, 2022

Bad Religion Kills Good People


The book "Prisoners of Geography" by Tim Marshall begins, "Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church."  

Vladimir Putin with Orthodox Christian Priests

And yet, Putin, a self-declared Christian has just invaded a neighboring country.  Rather than turn the other cheek, Putin is killing and maiming his neighbors. 

But Putin is certainly not alone when it comes hating and killing for Jesus.  Ever since the Church took secular power in the late 400s AD, killing and conquering in the name of the Prince of Peace has stained every century for the past millennia. It's worth noting for those who rationalize armed Christianity, Jesus was a penniless Jew who told his followers not to love or even care about this world, even to hate their father and mother and pursue the Kingdom of God.  

The worst of murderous Christianity in America was certainly when eleven states rebelled with the express purpose of keeping men and women in chains for life.  Sometimes the slavers even told those they oppressed about Jesus: as strong a declaration as could ever be made that their victims deserved love and were handed hate.   

A victim of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Every organized patriarchal religion with power uses that power to advance its own beliefs.  For some religions, killing heretics, invading neighbors and other expressions of secular power can be reconciled with the traditions of the faith.  Jews can defend Israel.  Muslims have a mandate to create a caliphate. 

I have read every word of the New Testament in several translations and a lot of it in the Greek in which it was written.  There is no way to twist the words of Jesus into an invasion or a Crusade.  A Buddhist government has the same flat contradiction. I have read a lot about the Buddha and his beliefs and life. No one created a Buddhist army reading Buddha.

Every day the world hears about how the "Christian" Vladimir Putin bombs, blasts and murders the mostly Christian people of Ukraine.  Right now, the bad religion of Vladimir Putin, his twisted version of Christianity, is killing innocent people in Ukraine.  


Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Wives and Mothers Will Rip Trump a New Asshole


Trump has dodged many bullets in his deplorable term as President, but he won't get out of this line of fire.  Military wives and mothers and fathers are asking for answers about the Russians paying bounties for dead Americans.  Trump can tell another hundred of his 20,000 lies denying he knew, but he now has an enemy that will not give up.

In 2011 and again in 2013 I was on a roster to be deployed to Afghanistan. In both cases I did some pre-deployment training. The first time I was cut from the roster when the deployment was reduced in size, the second time the entire deployment was cancelled.

If I had deployed, I planned to blog every day if possible.  And if I did, I knew that my main audience would be the wives and mothers and other family members of the soldiers in my unit.

When I deployed the first time and blogged every day, I thought my audience would my friends and family and maybe those who were curious about military service. They were my audience also, but most of the comments I got were from wives and mothers who heard little or nothing from their soldier.  They really wanted to know what we ate, where we slept, what we did night and day. 

The most popular post I wrote the whole year was about the containers we slept in
The wives and parents wanted to know about everything and they worried over every news report. If a base was attacked 200 miles away, someone would ask me what happened. I would answer that the attack was 200 miles away. The response would be some variation of, "No one tells me anything."

With more and more reports coming out confirming that both Pentagon and intelligence leaders knew the plot to be true, military wives and parents will demand answers until they get them.

No amount of bullying or whining will make this crisis go away. A grieving parent who feels betrayed is an implacable enemy.
          






                                        

Friday, January 22, 2016

Cold War Reheated: Resurgent Russia and Vladimir Putin


At the end of the Cold War, Russia fell into poverty and almost fell apart.  Whether you date the end of the Cold War as the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the crumbling of the Soviet Union in 1991, post-Soviet Russia was in a dismal state in the 1990s.  The collapse of government at nearly all levels made Russia a third-world economy with an enormous nuclear arsenal, as well as thousands and thousands of tons of nerve gas in rotting containers in rotting storage facilities.

I just finished reading Steven Lee Myers book "New Czar: Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin." This excellent book brings together many of the details of the life of the most powerful autocrat on the planet today--and is especially good on how a mid-level KGB agent went from the shadows to the heights of power and to enduring popularity with the Russian people.

Before I say any more about the book itself, reading the book gave me a huge feeling of a lost opportunity.  The circumstances of Putin's rise made me think, "It did not have to turn out this way."

In 1945, Germany was ruin and squalor with every level of government operating on totalitarian principles.  Yet America rode to the rescue with the Marshall Plan and set Germany, at least West Germany, on the road to democracy.  After we spent billions and billions trying to defeat the Soviet totalitarian state, why did we leave it to be run by a drunk selling off the assets of the state to his cronies?

The grinding poverty of the vast majority of Russians coupled with Yeltsin's cronies becoming billionaires put Putin in the presidency and kept him there.  Putin was unknown in 1999 when Yeltsin put him in power.  Ironically one of the reasons for Putin's rise to power was his honesty.  He worked very hard in government and did not take bribes like so many others in government.  Yeltsin put him in the presidency because no one had bought him off.

Myers makes very clear that Putin has been in charge since 2000 and could well continue in power till 2024, or even beyond.  Putin is, as Myers makes clear, on the way to being a new Tsar.  And he is popular.  Even with sanctions and the current crash of oil prices, the average Russian is far better off under Putin than in the 1990s.

Which brings me to another irony I felt reading this book.  The US did not rush in to prop up and bring order to Russia in collapse as we did with post-war Germany and Japan.  Yet in 2003, we went into Iraq saying we could do "nation building" in a state seething with sectarian hatred.

We may have won the Cold War, but the current state of Russia and other former Soviet states says that we lost the peace.  In the depths of its 1990s collapse, Russia was fending off Islamic extremism inside Russia and along its borders.  In the same way Germany became an anchor in the NATO defense of Europe, we could have worked with Russia as a front-line state in the fight against Islamic terror.

Putin was born just seven months before I was.  I grew up in a suburban house near Boston: safe, warm, happy and well-fed.  Putin grew up in the wreckage of Leningrad, arguably the most ravaged city in World War 2, under Nazi siege for almost three years.  Putin grew up hearing stories of the Great Patriotic War and the sacrifices his family, city and nation made to defeat the Nazis.  Putin is a patriot.  Restoring Russia's place as a world leader is and has always been part of his program as president.

A strong Russia could have been, should have been, our ally in the War on Terror.  Myers book is a great read, but it ends on a somber note of repression, deception and the tragedy of an airliner shot down either by Russian soldiers or separatists armed by Russians with advanced missiles.  If Myers writes a sequel in another decade, I hope it is about a Democratic Russia and not a 21st Century Tsarist Russia.  But the trend lines all point to a New Tsar.

Exhibit of Contemporary Art from Ukraine and Talk by Vladislav Davidzon at Abington Arts

I went to "Affirmation of Life: Art in Today's Ukraine" at Abington Arts in Jenkintown, PA. The exhibit is on display through...